Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
2 Sam 6:1-5, 12b-19; Ps 24; Eph 1:3-14; Mark 6:14-29
The word “Gospel” means “good news,” but today’s Gospel sheds more darkness than light. It is a story that is not bearable. A corrupt tyrant holds a feast; a beautiful girl dances; a malicious woman sells out her own daughter’s best interests; a good man dies. Why is this story even in our Scriptures? Why do we need to listen to it on a summer Sunday, when many of us are struggling to just to carry what we have been given to bear? Where is the hope we come here to find?
Not in this passage. Not, ever, in this passage. Particularly not if if you turn it inside out: There was a man who was old in years, and his wife, whom he loved, was barren. One day, he was serving the Lord and an angel came to him and said, “You will have a son. He will be great in Israel and will be destined for the falling and rising of many.” And when the old gasped in disbelief, the angel struck the old man mute until the birth of the boy. And the child was born and grew in grace and in holiness. He was devoted to the Lord all his days and his preaching drew many to repent of their sins and find strength to embrace goodness anew. But the king of that land arrested him and held him in prison, and finally, at feast when he had drunk too deeply, he had him killed to preserve his own reputation in the sight of men who wished to supplant him.
Told this way, the story makes clear a terrifying truth: holiness and goodness offer us no protection in this world. Even divine anointing offers us no protection in this world. In fact, it may attract the malice and cruelty of the powerful. Violence lurks, unpredictably, for just and for unjust alike.
We know this, of course. We see it often in the news. We don’t know what to do with it there, either. We gape in disbelief. We mourn. Or we turn it into salacious gossip, trivialize the losses because we do not know what else to do with them. We embrace cynicism because the alternative is grief. And yet, that does not make the stories any less dark. It just hardens our hearts so that we can see neither darkness nor light.
Evil is — and the fact that God redeems it does not make it any less evil. It still should not have been done. It still leaves a rent in our world and in our lives. This disquieting gospel passage, like so many other events in our lives, resists being woven neatly into a clean story. It calls the bluff on cheap optimism and saccharine hope, pushes us to reject our simplistic answers and come to a place that is hard, but necessary. A place of total reliance on the word of love that God is speaking to us, even when all the voices around us say something else. That’s what it means to put our faith in Christ.
If we end there, we end in a pretty dark place, one where, if we are not at the table, we are on the menu.1 But in fact, we’re not meant to end there. This Gospel reading is actually part of a pair; two stories, each telling of a feast, set next to one another because they are supposed to be heard together. They complete one another. And so, with your permission, let’s take a look at what happens next. Jesus’ disciples come to Jesus and tell him that his cousin is dead, and Jesus calls them to go away with him and rest. Probably, to mourn. But when they take a boat and go to a quiet place, the crowds follow and Jesus teaches them. As evening falls, the disciples become aware that no one has much to eat, and begs Jesus to send them away. But Jesus takes what they have (five loaves and a few fish), blesses it, and distributes it among them. And all ate and were well filled. Only then do they return to their homes.
It’s not much of a feast: green grass instead of elegant tables, the simple food of the poor, a motley assembly of people — whoever showed up — rather than a carefully-curated guest list. The contrast could not be more striking. And yet…on this table was life. Instead of seductive dancing, we have sound moral and spiritual teaching. Instead of pandering to his followers, who wanted him to send the crowd away, Jesus refuses to sell out the powerless and the poor. Rather, he feeds them, ensures they have enough strength for their journey. St. Mark writes, “He had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” (Mark 6:34). The compassion which was missing from the tables of the great.
These twinned stories present us with a stark choice: the way of Christ, or the way of power. In one, people are objects to be used and discarded. In the other, people are there to be claimed as brothers and sisters and kin. Claimed, because that’s what we are to one another, if we allow ourselves to remember.
Each of us gets to choose which banquet becomes the foundation of our life. We get to choose, but the powers of this world do not wish us to choose freely, or to know that we even have a choice. We are submerged, you and I, in a dominant culture which tries to make us forget. Daniel Berrigan calls it out: “Sound bite[s], billboard[s], vapid political gobbledy-gook, [celebrities] and their epiphanies — these are …false promises of beatitude.” They tempt us to forget who we were created to be, to replace our god-given self with the empty aspiration to be someone else. (Berrigan, Jeremiah, 139.)
Against this erosion of our humanity, this death by a thousand distractions, Jesus interposes himself — not metaphorically. The antidote to distraction is remembering, and remembering is the central act of prayer. We gather each week to hear the stories, to sing the hymns, to see our community, to touch one another, to be reminded of who we are and whose. To rest our souls from all the competing pulls of modern life and to have space to breathe the breath of God — the divine ruach which gives us life.
At the center of it all is Communion, not the table at which we are on the menu, but the table at which all are welcome, and God himself is the feast. It’s hard for us to feel how radical this is, but when Christ gave his disciples the cup, saying, “This is my blood, given for you,” what he was doing was utterly transgressive. God had forbidden his people to eat blood, saying, “If anyone of the house of Israel or of the aliens who reside among them eats any blood, I will set my face against that person who eats blood, and will cut that person off from the people. For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you for making atonement for your lives on the altar.” (Lev 17: 10-11) The life of the creature is its blood — therefore, blood belonged only to God, the giver of life. When Jesus offered the disciples his blood, he was offering them the very life of God — holy, divine, renewing life, coursing through our veins, leaping in our hearts, anchoring us in God’s truth, bearing us into the Kingdom of Love.
Against all the pressures of our lives, God gives us himself, with us, in us, come what may. That does not mean we are shielded from the powers of this world, any more than John the Baptist was, or Jesus himself. It may well mean that we are opened to them, opened to seeing through the attractive lies, “beyond the beautiful forevers” (Katherine Boo). We are given God’s own power to resist deadening distraction with anamnesis, the holy remembering which does not leave Christ in the pages of history, but brings him alive in our own lives today.
When that holy feast becomes reality for us, Christ’s commitment evokes our own. There’s a story I love, a story about Jeremiah, the prophet whose burden was to proclaim that his people must be destroyed. It was a terrible task. But as his words became true, as the armies of Babylon surrounded Jerusalem, Jeremiah did an astonishing thing: He bought a piece of land. Land which was located underneath the feet of the Babylonians. He bought the land and he signed and witnessed the deed and buried it in a clay pot, knowing that he was unlikely ever to walk on his own field. But that purchase gave him a stake in a different future: he put his weight into the scales. More than that: he demonstrated that a different world was possible, a world beyond the maneuverings of power. A world of grass and trees and clean air and freedom, a world worth committing ourselves to.
Each of us is called to make that choice, to put our weight into the balance, to act for the world we yearn to see. It may not be buying a piece of land, but any of us can call a friend, feed a stranger, plant a tree, help someone find a refuge, bring beauty of some sort into this world. It may not seem like much, but there are a lot of us, ordinary people doing what we can, wherever we are, even when it seems unlikely to make much difference at all.
In her book I’m Still Here, activist Austin Channing Brown writes, “I have learned not to fear the death of hope. In order for me to stay in this work, hope must die.” But she chooses to continue, saying: “It is working in the dark, not knowing if anything I do will ever make a difference. It is speaking anyway, writing anyway, loving anyway. It is enduring disappointment and then getting back to work.” She is speaking of a hard kind of integrity, of living out the truth you know in a world that may not ever welcome it, not because it will make a difference, but because that is who God created you to be.
The ancients called that place “disinterest,” which is not the same thing as lack of interest. Disinterest is doing the right thing simply because it is the right thing, whether it will benefit you or anyone else or not. It’s the gig-worker who points out that her employer has overpaid her by mistake; the fidelity of an old woman who has lost her husband and children, but who gets up to pray each morning anyway; the kindness of a school-bus driver who shows up each morning even though the kids behave like kids on school-buses do. It’s the rich meat in the ancient prayer which asks that we may “know and understand what things [we] ought to do and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them.”
I have to be honest with you. The stories about such people do not tend to last long or to end well. A black preacher who pressed for Civil Rights for his people and for fair treatment for all workers, gunned down in Memphis. An archbishop in El Salvador who urged his nation’s corrupt and broken government to have concern for the desperately poor, gunned down while he was celebrating the Mass. A young rabbi, a person of deep compassion, who was tried on sham charges and nailed to a cross.
No, these stories do not end well. But, my God! — what a light they shed.
1. I tried to track down the author of that quote, but a rather large number of people seem to believe it is theirs.